Namwali Serpell

Sun Ra: ‘I’m Everything and Nothing’

The photographer Ming Smith’s pictures of Sun Ra from 1978 beautifully capture his energy.

In the Time of Monsters

The new ‘Watchmen’ show is an example of the clash of the slick and the woke that we’re seeing in so much contemporary cultural production.

The Banality of Empathy

Narrative is an incredible vehicle for virtual experience—we think and feel with characters. It simulates empathy, so we believe it stimulates it. But if witnessing suffering firsthand doesn’t spark good deeds, why do we think art about suffering will?

Beastly: The Bad Women of ‘The Favourite’

I have never seen a film like The Favourite: a story about three bad women—bad in very different, very interesting ways—whose badness both makes and breaks the relationships between them.

‘Sorry to Bother You’: Boots Riley’s Trojan Horseplay

Acting white is the premise of Boots Riley’s raucous new film, Sorry to Bother You. What tumbles forth from this premise is a wild, campy romp. Indeed, smuggled inside Riley’s rollicking mashup of surrealism and sci-fi is a cutting critique of race and class.

‘Black Panther’: Choose Your Weapons

Movies often flatten real African cultures into two-dimensional imagery—stereotypes in stereo, a quilt of clichés. But in Wakanda, Ryan Coogler has created a country in the subjunctive mode: what if…?

Blade Runner’s Immaterial Girls

If the original movie obsessed over the relative “realness” of humans and replicants, Blade Runner 2049 ramifies that obsession by testing the question against another “being.”

The Great Africanstein Novel

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s magisterial first novel Kintu continually diverts us from our preconceptions about Africa.

Glossing Africa

Whenever African writers are on a panel together, we are asked about the continent as a whole. When African writers get together on our own, we talk about glossaries.

Kenya in Another Tongue

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s novel Devil on the Cross, published in a new edition this week, reminds us there is no pure or ur-language, not even the one your mother spoke.